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Reviews

Product Description

Legendary monster hunter Van Helsing is sent by the Vatican to distant Transylvania, a land terrorised by the powerful Count Dracula. Joining forces with a valiant gypsy princess who is determined to end an ancient curse on her family by defeating the infamous vampire, Van Helsing continues his quest to rid the world of evil.Directed by Stephen Sommers (The Mummy, The Mummy Returns) and starring Hugh Jackman (X-Men, X2, X-Men United) and Kate Beckinsale(Pearl Harbour, Underworld), Van Helsing defines the legends that are Dracula, Wolfman and Dr Frankenstein’s Monster in this intense action adventure.

From Amazon.co.uk

Like a roller coaster ready to fly off its rails, Van Helsing rockets to maximum velocity and never slows down. Having earned blockbuster clout with The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, writer-director Stephen Sommers once again plunders Universal's monster vault and pulls out all the stops for this mammoth $148-million action-adventure-horror-comedy, which opens (sans credits) with a terrific black-and-white prologue that pays homage to the Universal horror classics that inspired it. The plot pits legendary vampire hunter Van Helsing (Hugh Jackman) against Dracula (the deliciously campy Richard Roxburgh), his deadly blood-sucking brides, and the Wolfman (Will Kemp) in a two-hour parade of outstanding special effects (980 in all) that turn Sommers' juvenile plot into a triple-overtime bonus for CGI animators. In alliance with a Transylvanian princess (Kate Beckinsale) and the Frankenstein monster (Shuler Hensley), Van Helsing must prevent Dracula from hatching his bat-winged progeny, and there's so much good-humored action that you're guaranteed to be thrilled and exhausted by the time the 10-minute end-credits roll. It's loud, obnoxious, filled with revisionist horror folklore, and aimed at addicted gamers and eight-year-olds, but this colossal monster mash (including Mr. Hyde, just for kicks) will never, ever bore you. A sequel is virtually guaranteed. --Jeff Shannon--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

I don't realise why this film got so many negative reviews; it's not an awful movie. Story was okay, along with the acting, but it wasn't horrible. Picture and audio quality was superb for a 2003 film, and buying it on Blu-ray was worth it.

"Van Helsing" is a kitchen sink monster movie, so it is a question of how far it can go before things fall apart, which for me was pretty far. The best part of writer-director Stephen Sommers' film is arguably the prologue, done in glorious black & white as a wonderful homage to the Universal monster pictures of yesterday. In Transylvania the torch bearing peasants are storming Castle Frankenstein, where the Victor (Samuel West) has just brought his creation (Shuler Hensley) to life and is screaming, "It's alive! Alive! Alive!," the words immortalizing by Colin Clive back in 1931's "Frankenstein." However, there is a twist in that Dr. Frankenstein is working with Count Dracula (Richard Roxburgh), who is after the secret of creating life for his own purposes. Events take their tragic course and then we pick up the story a year later in color with the title character (Hugh Jackman) in Paris on the trail of the Hunchback of Notre Dame (who actually turns out to be a different literary monster).To be clear, this is not Abraham Van Helsing, the wise doctor of Bram Stoker's "Dracula" novel, but a mysterious monster killer whose first name turns out to be Gabriel. I would say that he is decked out like Solomon Kane, but that has nothing to do with any of the Universal monster movies. He is dispatched by a secret organization in the Vatican to go to Transylvania and kill Dracula. Not just because the count is an evil vampire, but because the noble house of Valerious has been fighting Dracula for several hundred years and the entire family can only go directly to heaven, passing purgatory or worse, if they kill the vampire before he wipes out their family, which is now down to Prince Velkan (Will Kemp) and Princess Anna (Kate Beckinsale).Read more ›

Ok the story line isn't going to tax anybody with just the single brain cell. But lets not forget its not there to be cerebrally challenging . Its pop corn for the brain and you know what it does it very well. However Im not here to discuss the script but rather the Blue Ray version.

Well, as Blue Ray releases go, I have to admit this is one of the better ones. Colours, clarity are spot on. In fact having watched this on TV the other week the Blue Ray version is much better. Watching the title character riding across the snow capped mountains near the start of the film is something else, but the scene in the Romanian town centre halfway through the female vampire attack when the sun comes out really differentiates Blue Ray from normal DVD. Somebody else has already mentioned the Ball scene, but its worth just seeing that for how all the different colours are allowed to explode into view. . The rest of the film displays just as much as the few samples I mentioned above. Its also good to see that the same amount of attention has been paid to the sound.

While I'm not one for extras there is a picture in picture mode which brings up a small screen showing the same as the main picture but from the view of the camera man and a few other snippets.(As i said I'm not one for extras)

Most people who buy this blu-ray will do so as an upgrade to the dvd especially as it has been on the television recently and if you like the movie it's a worthwhile upgrade. Picture quality is excellent and is presented full screen and the DTS-HD Master audio soundtrack fills your room with sound and music. Extras are very much the same as the dvd release with the addition of a 20 minute feature on the masked ball scene which is well worth watching. Most of the story is set in the dark and this benefits from the blu-ray transfer as everything is so much clearer.

This film seems to be panned a lot in Couchpotatolands for not being better than it is when it is still a lot of fabulous fun...true,after the CGI was paid for,the sorry Thespians fee must have been not more than a £100.00 each,true,the silly plot does get supercomplex and incredibler but then so surreal are the premises of all the classic monster fiction that Sommers so enthusiastically pastiches as he did in his 1999 The Mummy,which was excellent fun-true,there are a tad too many ridiculous superhuman stunts,especially nearer the end and the end itself might be a mite sentimental as the love affair was a trifle sudden but that's the feelgood sweetener,no doubt.

It seems also,that the actors accents have been overly criticised for being inauthentic but this is grossly hypocritical because Anglo-Amerika's lazy Commonwealth Couch Potatoes hate to read subtitles,let alone 'Read', anyway and want every tiresome foreigner to speak English and as such,they do fine...Almost no Commonwealth film-makers embed linguistic integrity in the screenplay save Gibson,recently...I take a star off for no Romanian or Latin or continental lingo dub option.

David Wenham is great light relief beside the earnest eye candy Hero/oes and Heroine and complements the very ludicrous Oscar Wildeish Dracula character who would surely make Vlad Tsepesh turn in his grave,lucky for the actor he's dead,even if Romanians roll their eyes at such films.Read more ›